The purpose of this course is to provide the student with lab skills in order to prepare them to pursue entry-level, technical-level, or professional-level careers in bioscience and biotechnology. The laboratory portion of this course will focus on providing student with a set of basic biotech labs skills such as documentation, quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) and good laboratory practices (GLPs). Students will also learn concepts of experimental design and analysis, cell culture, biomanufacturing, immunology, protein analysis, DNA techniques (i.e. genetic engineering, polymerase chain reaction, DNA sequencing, and forensic analyses), and bioinformatics. This course is also designed to serve as the prerequisite to other biotechnology courses in DNA analysis (BIO 251) and protein analysis (BIO 252).

Course Prerequisites/Corequisites
Students are expected to have completed BIO101 or BIO173. BIO253: Concepts in Biotechnology must either be taken previously or concurrent with enrollment in this course.

Course Objectives

Upon completing the course, the student will be able to:

Maintain proper documentation of lab protocols and experiments via the use of laboratory notebooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Use material data safety sheets to understand chemical compounds including their proper storage, handling, and risks.

Detail the process by which experiments are performed in biotechnology, including the application of the scientific method, experimental design, and data analysis.